Not unlike what's going on in several high schools right here in Wisconsin. Just yesterday there was ahuge uproar about an American Issues teacher in Muskego requiring his students to create posters declaring their political leanings.

An insult to the East Germans. The propaganda of the German Democratic Republic was sublime in it's subtlety. Masterful work like "All in the Family" came cranking out of the Stasi shop. Making the Norte Americano liberals feel superior to the blue collar proles that formed the backbone of American anti-communism was their primary goal. The propaganda ministry caused Carter's election. The East Germans took the best of what Goebbels had taught and improved on it.

Just have the kid refuse. And if the teacher gives a bad grade, file a suit against the teacher and the schol board. The board will probably accept a settlment that coveers attorney's fees and the firing of the teacher.

This case is an exemplary reason why the dept. of education be abolished, vouchers permitted and public sector unions banned.

What a great assignment! I wish my teachers had done more real-world-based assignments like this where I could learn interesting things. People are pooping in their pants over nothing, here. It's not like those kids were going to find anything that the campaigns haven't. Maybe the teacher should have given them the choice of candidates to vet to avoid the appearance of partisanship, but then how do you settle the dispute between the four kids who have to work on the project together? Just assign a candidate and let them get to the real point of the assignment - learn how political campaigns work. This is valuable knowledge that citizens can use, and it's worth a whole lot more than most of the crap public schools are teaching.

To be fair, I'm sure the opposition research done by these 8th graders will be far more coherent, logical, and tempered than anything Media Matters has ever produced. George Soros may even evaluate their exemplary work and end up cutting Media Matters' funding to divert resources to this school.

“The principal advised the teacher that he should emphasize to his students that this assignment was meant to learn a process and not to endorse a particular candidate,” Torre said. “The teacher agreed with the principal’s direction.”

And yet, still no attempt made to include Obama as the target of opposition research.

If it is about the learning process (waves to Jennifer whitewashing) then candidates from both parties are chosen.

If its about partisan brainwashing (again, hi Jen) then only the GOP is targeted.

A Pulitzer Prize awaits the first intrepid writer who finds indisputable evidence that Obama ever had a summer job in high school or college. They can get a second Pulitzer for evidence that Joe Biden's IQ exceeds room temprature.

I’m going to assume that there is more to the story and that some of the details are being misreported or misrepresented. This is one of those stories that sounds “too good to be true” if you want to see Obama defeated and I would caution against taking this story at face value.

Democrats have a long history of engaging in partisan political activity on the taxpayers dime:

The Hatch Act, sponsored by Senator Carl Hatch of New Mexico, was passed in 1939 after a controversy involving the Works Progress Administration (WPA) and allegations that workers had been used by local Democratic Party politicians during the 1938 congressional elections.

Okay, assuming that they're not forwarding this Intel to campaigns, and other than the one-sidedness of this, what's really wrong with it?

Other than that, Mrs. Lincoln.....

The one sidedness is definitely a problem.Also, researching to whom you would send oppo research seems a tad creepy to me. It kind of reinforces one of the less pleasant aspects of our political culture.

If I had written this lesson, it absolutely would have been a two parter, including the same research on the current President.Agreed, but I would have divided the class in two and have had half the class working on the pro-D research while the other half worked on the pro-R research and then made them switch halfway through. Sort of like learning to argue both sides in moot court.

Madison is right on this. There seems to be ginned up outrage in this story. It's only natural the teacher would focus on the Republican candidates, because that's the only political contest so far. If Obama was being challenged for nomination, the assignment would probably have been more expansive.

I think the question that really needs to be investigated is - Why is a parent with obvious conservative leaning even allowed to live in Fairfax County? Aren't there standards?

"...and other than the one-sidedness of this, what's really wrong with it?"

I think it sounds like an interesting assignment in some ways. In others it's sort of silly. What are they doing to do, run a content search of HuffPo? Unless it was better instruction than that on how to find public records and other "real" data... which I sort of doubt... but it could be really good.

My objection would be the one-sidedness of it. It does present a case where the class is set up to discuss one party, and only one party, in negative terms.

Certainly there are Democrat politicians running for office here and there. Have them do research on the local candidates of a race in a different state, that would be the best. All the learning objectives are met and no one has a personal opinion they need to be shamed into denying.

But what is the teacher going to say about it if he's not aware of the potential problems without being told? No one in my class will be made uncomfortable because they don't properly think Santorum is a hateful bigot, because we have freedom of ideas here, even hateful bigotry? No one is going to hear the idiotic opinions of their backward parents mocked and feel like they have to take it?

"In order to cover all bases, the teacher, Michael Denman, divided his honors civics class into four groups of six students each, one group per Republican candidate. Within each group, two students were tasked with identifying the weaknesses, two with writing the attack strategy paper, and two with finding an individual within the Obama campaign to whom the information could be forwarded."

It's only natural the teacher would focus on the Republican candidates, because that's the only political contest so far. If Obama was being challenged for nomination, the assignment would probably have been more expansive.That really doesn’t make a lot of sense. The assignment is to find weaknesses that could be used in the general election. Obama is the only one who for sure will be running in the general election and if anything, the assignment would fit more perfectly when focused on the weaknesses of a candidate that you know for sure will be running.

This assignment was set up so that the class would learn that only republicans have taken inconsistent positions, or have skeletons in the closet. Obama (and all democrats) are left pure. If the teacher doesn't see that side effect of his assignment, he should not be dealing with such topics.

One group of kids could have been tasked to find inconsistent statments/positions by Obama, and then the class could have discussed that. They could then have place the whole assignment in the proper context. As it was, they were being miseducated on the topic, which I see as worse than remaining uneducated at their age.

If you want to teach people to think critically, why not use a fictional campaign? For example, like from the West Wing or a similar fictional show. Sure, people might say West Wing was biased, but it is significantly less biased than asking someone to dig up dirt on specific people.

Or, why not use a historical campaign? For example, I hear the Jackson campaign could have really used some good crisis management in the past.

There was no good reason to use a modern, on-going campaign -- especially where only one side was targeted.

"John Torre, a spokesman on behalf of the Fairfax County Public School system, insists that students were never instructed to actually send their results to the Obama campaign."

-- Oh, that makes it all better. I'm sure if they were not instructed to send their oppo research on Obama to Karl Rove, it would be OK to have them do it!

Again, there are plenty of options available that don't send off alarm bells. Making the assignment balanced, using historical/fictional campaigns -- using the local level politicians talking about things like parking and local property taxes, etc.

Just a "find bad things about Republicans" is a -lazy- assignment and doesn't actually teach you how a real campaign is done.

Suppose all public schools, whenever they touched any live political issue, always came down on the side of one party; always made support of one party's positions a condition of success; always made it clear that refusal to at least fake enthusiasm for the right party could endanger a student's chances of passing.

Would there be anything really wrong with that? (Aside from, maybe, the one-sidedness?)

I don't care if they found where to send the info or if they actually sent the info. I'm sure the Obama campaign already knows where to find HuffPo and KoS and whoall else.

Current educators have a "relevance" fetish that makes them stupid. "Let's do this real thing! And pretend that it's really real like Real Life! And pretend like you might find something that is really Relevant and matters."

So in a fit of "relevance" induced "dumb" the teacher assigns only the people in the current active presidential primary.

Doh!

Fellow needs to keep that one father's contact info so he can call and say "Hey, dude, I need a quick sanity check... is this going to piss off people like you, who I never interact with in my life?"

Fellow needs to keep that one father's contact info so he can call and say "Hey, dude, I need a quick sanity check... is this going to piss off people like you, who I never interact with in my life?"

That’s actually not a half-bad idea so long as he’s willing to accept that sometimes the father might say, “I’m not pissed off but here’s why I think you’re wrong . . .”They used to have a token Republican on the “West Wing” who Seaborn and company went to try to gauge how Republicans might react to a proposal by the Bartlet administration. One time they actually had an episode where Sam went to Ainsley Hayes with a proposal and she convinced him to do the opposite.But then BDS set in and the show pretty much went downhill from there.

Of course I do not really know anything about East Germany high schools, but I do know that my Norwegian teacher in Norway would not have touched anything like that with a 10' pole.And he was an ardent socialist (an actual, real one, but on his own time - not in the classroom).

A lot of commentators are finding fault with the teacher because he only assigned his students to "one side" and this is "not fair".

If you think about it, what would be unfair would be assigning any of the class to investigate President Obama:

This public school teacher, being well-educated and fair-minded, must know that students would find nothing, nothing, nothing on the squeaky-clean administration. It would be totally unfair to these students--running into a brick wall of promises kept and a level of openness in administrative detail heretofore unknown in the modern presidency. Meanwhile those lucky students assigned to the Republican field would be mining trove after rich trove of skeletons, hypocrisy and evil--which they could turn into projects which would easily earn A+ for all of them.

This very thing happened in the Verona School District during a prior election. When my daughter told me about the assignment I told her she would not be doing that assignment until I spoke with her teacher. I told the teacher she would do a paper in which she would compare and contrast the candidates positions on a specific issue. If he would not agree I would go the principal and then to the school board and then to the media. His decision on how to proceed would make my decision for me. He responded my daughter would get a "0" for her grade. I went to the principal, explained my position and told him where I would go if he did not intervene. He intervened and my daughter did a position paper on gun control.

Parents can not be afraid to call teachers on these issues. You just have to be be sure to have a clear idea of another way to accomplish the learning goal of the assignment.

Althouse voted for Obama and therefore the entire apparatus that supports him and has tightened its grip exponentially around liberty's neck since the start of his reign CAN'T BE LIKE EAST GERMANY! Anyway, Althouse is in no way threatened - she thinks - so what me worry?

I think Obama is a total disaster, and I have never supported him. I'm in Walter E. Williams conservative territory ideologically.

And I think people are overreacting about this assignment. There's also not enough information to form such definite negative opinions. How do we know what assignment was going to come next? (Or maybe someone does know that, and I just missed it.)

It would be easy to brush this off as either 1) a misunderstanding and an overeaction 2) an isolated incident, except this is not the first time that Virginia teachers have been engaging in, shall we say, directing their students during election years.

Freeman Hunt said...There's also not enough information to form such definite negative opinions.

You remind me of the epistemologist who suspected his wife was having an affair. So he followed her one night. She met a man at a bar. They had a few drinks. Then they drove to a motel and got a room.

The philosopher sat in the parking lot and watched from his car. They went into the room. The curtains were open. He saw his wife undress and recline on the bed. The man took his clothes off. Then he closed the curtains.

The epistemologist slammed his fist on the dashboard and exclaimed, "Oh, DAMN the uncertainty!"

Do we know for certain that this lesson was not to be followed by one looking at things from the other perspective?

That’s a fair question. The school already responded to questions on the assignment and an answer like “actually we having them do both sides” would seem like a slam-dunk way of deflecting criticism. It could be that the principal or the spokesperson did not know for certain. Or it could be that the answer was “no.” Or it could also be that they were never asked that question. Or perhaps the assignment has been so mischaracterized as “opposition research” that the question isn’t really relevant because they were really doing something like analyzing “[i]dentify[ing] & practice[ing] strategies for evaluating campaign materials” which is part of their Standards for Civics and Economics for Eighth Graders or something similar.

That being said, I stand by my original comments that I think there is probably a lot of misreporting and misinformation being put out about this story. The Daily Caller piece is based entirely on one anonymous parent’s characterization of the assignment. I have no reason to take the word of an anonymous source. For someone who thinks that public school teachers are generally in the bag for Obama, this story seems almost “too good to be true” and we’ve seen how often people on both sides of the aisle have gotten suckered into believing something that validated their preconceived notions of people on the other side that later turned out not to be true.

There’s nothing to be lost by reserving judgment and keeping a cool head until the facts come out.

When my daughter, now a lawyer and Obama supporter, was in 6th grade, her class had a war crimes trial for Harry Truman and convicted him for dropping the atomic bomb. Then, as now, these kids have no idea.

Speaking of dictators and stuff, the EU is getting tough on Syria. This from Laura Rozen:

Syrian first lady Asma al-Assad's infamous luxury shopping sprees may be coming to an end.European foreign ministers due to meet Friday in Brussels are expected to slap new sanctions on the dictator's wife.The sanctions, if agreed, would mean the British-born Asma al-Assad "will no longer be able to travel to the EU or buy from EU-based shops, in her own name," Reuters reports. The proposed new measures come as the U.N. Security Council voted unanimously Wednesday to endorse a statement pledging support for former U.N. chief Kofi Annan's peace mediation efforts in Syria.

Having attending Fairfax Country Schools since 4th grade, I'm not surprised. Although Virginia is a non-union State, it doesn't stop some teachers from pushing their own agenda. I remember in 8 grade history class we were suppose to read three newspaper articles a week and bring them into class to discuss the topics.

While the predominant paper is the Washington Post, my parents subscribed to the Washington Times (a right leaning paper). My teacher would always comment that my particular articles were 'not true' and 'shouldn't be taken seriously'. Anything left leaning was praised in class.

certainly nothing wrong with asking students to think about current events/the election/the candidates. had the task been to research both the strengths and weaknesses of the guys in the running, then no problemo. instead, however, the assignment crossed a line when the students were asked to find only the candidates'vulnerabilities...with, i assume, the goal being to groom the kids for future careers at media matters. now had this stayed in the classroom it would have been troublesome enough but that these student findings were then to be SENT TO THE OBAMA ADMINISTRATION goes way, way beyond creepy into outrageous and downright frightening territory. if my kid was in that class, i'd be chasing the teacher around armed with a 2x4 about now.

I was in Leipzig last May and while there visited the Stasi museum. It's in what was formerly the Stasi headquarters. Creepy is an entirely inadequate word. Not only that but hearing from a friend and those who grew up in communist East Germany makes it sound even creepier. Informants were everywhere, totally undermining community. Kids were recruited to spy on other kids, to divulge information about their parents. I could go on and on. Freaked me out.

At the same time, there was a significant more amount of job and life security. Suicides spiked after reunification because suddenly people had to depend on themselves and didn't know how to do that.

This present school stuff isn't much like East Germany, but it's definitely also entirely not fitting. Again, this is why I think "orientating philosophy" should be used instead of "religion". Folks with all kinds of goals want to use mandatory public forums to indoctrinate others, and only rarely does this involve some kind of deity.

Another reason it's creepy is that these kids are being forced to help a particular candidate beat another against their will. Now what if a child had parents who were actively working for the opposition campaign or just dedicated supporters of the candidate their child is being forced to badmouth and actively help get defeated. It's incredibly myopic for this teacher to not see how foolish this was. I'd be pissed that my kid's teacher was so dumb.

What's really creepy is the state of the American education system. Most teachers in K-12 aren't smart enough to teach their kids anything. College teachers are largely left wing propagandists. I shudder half the time when I meet my kids' teachers.

The father should have had his child do a comparison/contrast between the Republican candidate and Obama with all the Republican's "weaknesses" being stronger than Obama's strengths.

Of course, the teacher's just wanting more easy money for being a shitty teacher.

In addition to the general creepiness of the one-sidedness of this project, what's further creepy is that it's not learning a particular candidate's platform or goals or experience, but muckraking and attacks. Even if you want to naively construct something harmless about this, it's an awful thing to teach kids that politics is all about digging up something from the opposition's past ("Mitt Romney doesn't care about dogs! His religion is weird!").

Jane, you've nailed the thing that bugs me about this episode. I'm appalled with the whole postmodern cloak enshrouding the assignment: Let's find 'weaknesses' in the opponents' platform and then strategize how to exploit them.

How about including what the candidates stand for? This Alinsky-izing of America bugs the shit out of me. Please; you want to be an effective leader, just stand for something and don't just look to exploit weaknesses. You will have to defend yourself, but people will ultimately respect you for it. I'm not saying you have to be civil and bland; call out your opponent if need be, but ultimately you should be known as someone who stands FOR something first and foremost.

It makes me think of an artist who myopically focuses on the negative space without ever acknowledging or representing the positive foreground object staring him/her right in the face.

The Daily Caller piece is based entirely on one anonymous parent’s characterization of the assignment. I have no reason to take the word of an anonymous source. For someone who thinks that public school teachers are generally in the bag for Obama, this story seems almost “too good to be true” and we’ve seen how often people on both sides of the aisle have gotten suckered into believing something that validated their preconceived notions of people on the other side that later turned out not to be true.

This.

If I posted, "A guy's dad said [...]," wouldn't you want more information?"

There are a number of reason the teacher might say, "No comment." It might be because he's arrogant and malicious, but it also might be because that's school or union policy. Or it could be simple annoyance. Had I assigned this and a reporter called, I might give "no comment" just out of annoyance at the intrusion.

As for the description of the incident, we're getting this from the teacher to the child, from the child to the father, from the father to the reporter, from the reporter to us.